When You Can't Sleep, How Good Is Lying in Bed With Your Eyes Closed?

By Brian Fung

The key differences between sleep and "quiet wakefulness"

Fake-sleeping kitten, only fooling herself. (yoppy/Flickr)

Reddit is a great forum for raising scientific questions, but the fact that it's discussion-based makes it difficult to know when a debate has settled on the best answer, objectively speaking. Exhibit A concerns the value of lying down with your eyes closed. How much does it do for you compared to actual sleep? The whole exercise can seem like a waste. Is it?

Part of what makes this question so slippery is that it hinges in large part on the matter of what sleep is actually for. We can all name the benefits of sleep, but saying what sleep accomplishes is a far cry from identifying what sleep is meant to do. The distinction is important. If the point of sleep is that being inactive frees up our energy for other tasks (say, recovering from a cold), we might expect lying in bed with our eyes closed -- what some studies call "quiet wakefulness" -- to accomplish much the same thing.

Researchers are growing increasingly confident, though, that sleep evolved specifically to recharge the brain. Dr. Chiara Cirelli, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has been studying the difference between sleep and quiet wake in humans. She says that while we're awake, all of our neurons are constantly firing, but that when we're asleep, the neurons revert to an "up-and-down" state in which only some are active at a given time. During some stages of sleep, all neuron activity goes silent. And that's likely when the restful part of sleep takes place.

"This period of silence and hyper-polarization of the cell membrane is probably related to the restorative function of sleep," Cirelli told me. "The fact that there are these periods of total silence, that's very typical and unique of sleep relative to wake and there might be something related to that."

To understand the value of total neural silence, let's look at another kind of sleeping animal -- dolphins. Dolphins, along with whales, some sharks, and a variety of other
underwater critters, need to stay moving to breathe. It follows that these animals can't go completely unconscious like humans can -- otherwise, the
dolphins couldn't come up for air, and oxygenated water would stop flowing over the sharks' gills. And the research seems to bear that out: brain scans show that dolphins never go into a full sleep state; instead,
they turn off half of their brains for about eight hours a day, leaving the other half alert. This
kind of rest has come to be called "unihemispheric sleeping."

The closest humans ever get to unihemispheric sleep is when a person who's extremely sleep-deprived shows signs of what Cirelli calls "local sleep in wake," in which a few neurons turn off by themselves. The effect is unnoticeable from the outside, because the sleep-deprived subject is still awake and moving, but researchers are able to record the changes using deep scanning technology that measures individual neurons.

But it's not until we get access to real, deep sleep that we get a cognitive boost from rest. In other studies, test subjects who were made to identify letters flashed on a screen for several hundred milliseconds at a time generally did worse at the exam over the course of a day. Those who got to take a nap halfway through showed more cognitive recovery than those who simply rested quietly, suggesting that there's a unique benefit to sleep that you don't get with quiet wakefulness, microsleep, or unihemispheric sleep.

"This function is only happening when there is a real nap with real sleep as measured with EEG," said Cirelli.

Lying down isn't completely useless -- it does help your muscles and other organs relax. But you'd get the same results just from reclining on the couch. So sleep is still your best friend.

The useful takeaway is that your best move, if you've been in bed for 20 minutes and still aren't dozing off, is to get up and engage in a low-light, low-stress activity like reading until you begin to feel tired. Taking your mind off of "Why am I not sleeping?! I need to sleep!" is crucial. When you do get up, though, don't use your computer or phone or watch TV -- the blue-colored light from the screens tricks your body into thinking it's daytime and not releasing melatonin. Sweet, sweet melatonin.